My favourite game so far! Perfectly creepy. I feel like this is what space exploration should be about

My favourite entry too. The atmosfere was perfect and the game itself is really fun. I accidentally fell off the cliff and then I went looking for it with my second robot, it felt almost natural. Enabling the servos on all of the three robots and make them dance was pretty fun too. If you expand the project definitely let me know!

Great art style.

A really cool concept with excellent execution. Number 1 was lost roaming through the pillars for 5-10 minutes, with a creepy mechanical noise resonating through the darkness. Not sure if it was a bug or intended, but either way really added to the experience! I would love to see this idea developed into a bigger project.

It's a great way to marry exploration and puzzles, and is ripe for telling an interesting story.

Great atmosphere! A bit slow performance on my old Macbook, but that could not hinder me from exploring. :)

Not sure that I would call it a game. Not sure you didn't even intend it to be. More like a techdemo and a test of Unity and it's features. Nevertheless well done and well executed

Gr8 M8 i r8 8/8. Best game so far. What could have even made it cooler would be some random sounds. Like wind, footsteps, or stone falling. Make the cave more alive

The atmosphere of this game is brilliant. The idea of swapping between the drones and the simulatnious movement is also a cool idea. For me the inputs were bugged sometimes, so that the drones would not react or with a delay of two seconds. Maybe that is because I used the web version. With some more gameplay, this would definitely make a good game, the athmosphere is already there.

Amazing and great atmosphere! Really spooky, both visuals and sound!

At the green cavern at the bottom, is there any other way out there? Was quite scary when falling down the hole, though was a bit disapointed when the bot ended up back at home. :p

Great game, thanks for making it, has great potential! :)

Hi, nice game and congratulations ! Simple mechanics that still offered a decent amount of challenge.We're realizing a video with several games of the Ludum Dare #36. We made the same thing at the previous jam.

Can you add your game on indiexpo.net ? (it's free)
So we can include also your game in the video ;)
p.s. write #LDJAM in the game's description.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! It's really heartening to see such a positive response! I definitely want to work more with this mood and aesthetic, but I'm unsure whether I should continue with this project. I could definitely work more on optimising the game (sorry laptop users!) and expanding the map, but I wonder whether the drones as they exist are the best way to utilise that. I deliberately limited the view from the drones' cameras, but some of the areas are hard to portray because of that...

@micheleV: Sure, I'll keep you updated if I update this!

@LindenHoltWhittaker: Yeah, the echo-y clanging noise is deliberate. I imagine the chamber as incredibly vast, and occasionally something might fall from a distant section making the noise. Finding what was making it might be impossible though, with how large the chamber is.

@SetTheBet: Yeah, I didn't really intend it to be much like a traditional game. I'm interested in experimenting with games without endings or goals, so I imagine that's something I'll keep working with in the future.

@nitroix: There are some sounds I put in, but more would definitely make it more interesting. 'Alive' isn't really how I wanted the space to feel, though, so I would want to stay fairly sparce

@wheerd: If I do work on this more, I'll definitely aim to optimise things a bunch. I didn't have much time for that in the 48 hours...

@oskardevelopment: Unfortunately, that cave is where it ends for now. I really like the idea of being able to fall to different areas of the game, but in my mind that central cavern is almost unimaginably deep (millions of km, I'd say), so while perhaps I could add falling to lower platforms, at some point something would have to give.

Cool atmosphere and cool robots, they are cute and sad at the same time.
Maybe you could improve a bit the sound, put some wide reverb, add some ambient sound and make the electronic bips a bit less harsh.
Great job :)

Lovely art style, great lighting and a big plus for the fact that there were no apparent goal or gamification of the experience. The world was also really quite huge with surprising doorways and several stories high so to say. The music emanating from below as a guide. Very well done. If I toggled to control more than one bot I could have the ones laying on the side or upside down move about freely, which might not have been intended but was much appreciated comic effect.

Two very minor details, it would have been nice to be able to toggle cameras on the 1-3 buttons or assign camera and motion control to right hand side of the keyboard.

The game's view-port or whatever the thing is called on itch was too small for the game, there's a setting to increase it on the game's page.

Enjoyed the gigantic idea of small things on an immense world. Its a inner concerning game.

The Static filter was pretty cool effect . for a first project, this is pretty damn amazing. gj man

It's really fun because there are similar aspects with my own entry: multiple cameras, dark place, fine grain film effect... here, we have the pleasure of discovering a place. This is a great achievement especially for a first attempt using Unity.

Very cool atmosphere! I guess you could have added something to collect to make this more game-ish (if you even want to do that). Anyway, good job on your first 3d work!

nice enviroment. great base for a puzzle game where you have to manage three bots

Great atmosphere - particularly the positional sound effects. It was cool seeing a drone move from another's perspective. There are definitely some interesting game mechanics that could come from this!

Very nice mood. I really had the feeling I was some kind of ghost hunter, it was a bit creepy, but exciting at the same time.
It would have be nice in the future to diversify the place, the game could be about exploring an abandoned temple for exemple.
@gdcvdqpl

Great atmosphere! The graphics, specially the "noise" shader, really sells the idea that you are a drone exploring ruins.

I only you had succeeded at adding any interaction at all (e.g., puzzles using all 3 drones and their light... or using one to find a tune and singing it with other...), this could had been a nice game!
But I know too well how this kind stuff go, so yeah... XD

I loved how the atmosphere is a little creepy, even though that's was not the objective. The camera filters is really well implemented too and the models were awesome. The sfx annoyed me a little and it was not clear to me what i had to do in the game. Since i am a drone i really wanted to fly hahaha.

After a while a kinda felt like a drone myself. Bleeping and flashing sounds. Nice atmospere, but after a while gets a bit boring. Like the controls of the drones. how you can switch between the 3 drones, or simultaneously move.For the sound would be nice to have a more 3D experience. If the drone is far so would be the sound comming from the drone.

Couldn't find the exit but enjoyed the atmophere, very oppressive :)

@kmitz: I'll definitely look into reverb in future! I saw there was a Unity object for that, but I didn't want to try fiddling with that until I had the rest of the game together.

@local_minimum: I'm really glad you enjoyed the goal-less nature, that's always a gamble. The drones moving on their side was a bug I'd been hoping to fix, but unfortunately was too low on the priority list. Thanks for the other feedback too, I'll keep that in mind!

@GFM: I did have some ideas for interactions with things like old computer monitors or other broken robots, but I wouldn't want to add anything that forced too much structure to the experience.

@Bendev: Sorry, these drones are a bit too old to fly (though a movement bug sometimes lets them do it anyway)! Flying drones wouldn't really feel so much like Ancient Technology to me, I think.

@Crashtester: Actually, Unity should be playing the sound from each of the three drones. I think it generally gets drowned out by the sound of your own motors, though...

Interesting idea and controls. 5/5 on mood!

I like the idea of drones exploring and I like how you implemented the controls.
This allows for interesting options, like two drones performing a little dance for the other drone, driving in formation and such.

You managed to create a great atmosphere, very moody. Good job. However there seems to be nothing to discover or interact with. No story either.

This makes the game a hollow experience, which is a bit sad.

Scary! good atmosphere and the mechanics are awesome! It has a lot of potential.
A shame there is no clear objective though. Good job!

I love this. I would play this for hours even if there was no real goal, just bigger levels and stuff to interact with. I flipped one of the drones on its side and discovered that the movement is very strange and allows you to fly by turning if you do that. I also fell off a cliff into a pit; that was very traumatizing. A nice feature would be a button that automatically aligns all the drones to your active one, so you don't have to keep manually nudging them when moving over long distances because their angles are slightly different.

@BMacIntosh: The flipping onto the side thing was a bug I knew about, but didn't have time to fix in the 48 hours, that's definitely something I'd want to fix in any future versions. The idea of a button to align them is actually pretty cool, though! Thanks for that idea!

Nice art, considering this was your first 3d game you got a lot done. That said, maybe having just one robot, and a gameplay objective, would be a better use of time.

Good job, very atmosferic! As people have already pointed out, this entry seems a very nice start for a "first person puzzle + horror" experience.

It's tempting to imagine these robots exploring an alien planet; finding out a crazy cave that looks like a Salvador Dali painting! Then something goes really bad with the mission and so on.

You should totally try to build some puzzles and game mechanics around the sounds and lights that the robots can do! Maybe make that works like some form of language, add one crazy dialog system between them and some alien form. There's a lot of things you can do with you already have!

One thing: the rotation of the robots should not have acceleration, make it stop when the player release the key. I know that will make them less realistic, but changing this will avoid some people getting motion sickness.

Sorry my broken english! ^^'